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Wrap-up: Android Meetup with Alfonz and BLE for IoT

For our last developer meetup of the year, we turned to our Android team, who made sure that 2017 went out with a bang. We talked Alfonz! We talked BLE for IoT! And we talked Efficient Layouts (!!!). It was, as always, a magical evening.

Petr Nohejl dived in with a fascinating look at Alfonz, a multi-purpose library which he created to make the development process smoother and reduce boilerplate code in our apps.

“When I develop Android apps, I often repeat the same code. I use the same utilities or helper classes. I decided to pack these classes into a library and that's how Alfonz was born,” Petr explained. (Truly, the guy is an Android hero! Bow down, peasants.)

Vaclav Tarantík and Jiri Helmich were up next, leading a lively discussion on BLE for IoT and All Things Android.

“Since IoT is experiencing a huge boom these days and most of the communication is done via BLE, we found it really useful to provide some overview of the possibilities and the whole process of communication with devices via BLE, from device lookup to data exchange,” Vaclav said.

He and Jiri teamed up to talk about the bottlenecks they experienced in their projects and gave examples of various debugging tools and devices for prototyping apps without the need of having the actual devices. (Way cool, guys!)

“We realized during our projects that this can be really tricky sometimes and wanted to help the community to avoid our initial mistakes, so they can focus on the main thing -- app features,” Vaclav added.

Artem Ufimtcev ended our Prague and Brno meetups with a look at Efficient Layouts. It’s always good to have a refresher on this essential part of app development. Artem shared a few simple rules coders should keep in mind that will help optimize layout efficiency and cut down on development/maintenance time. (Juicy.)

“It's always good to use the least complex layout that satisfies developer needs. Google does a great job providing us with superior tools, and it's important to use them,” said Artem, who, along with all the rest of our presenters, continued to take questions during the meetup after-parties.